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Rediscovering the Obvious

An occasional journey through one man's perspectives as he fumbles along in the footsteps of many great men.

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Learning from Fast Food
Chipotle has the fastest service of any fast food vendor I go to. Rush hour, takes five minutes max. Go in when they're nearly empty and I can be out in under a minute. Feels faster than the best McDonald's times, even if it's not really. Why is this? Read More...

Posted Thursday, October 23, 2008 1:54 PM by willeke | 1 Comments

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Higher Education and Software Development: Following parallel paths
I’m typing this in the car on my way to Ohio to see the in-laws because I just finished having an incredibly compelling discussion with my wife. My wife is an educator and has a masters of education specialized in adult online learning with a minor in Read More...

Posted Monday, October 20, 2008 11:56 AM by willeke | 2 Comments

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The power of assumptions
I was a band member once upon a time. In middle school, I played French Horn for four years. Then, I didn't pick it back up for over 15 years until last December when my lovely wife gave me a wonderfully shiny silver French Horn for our five year anniversary, Read More...

Posted Friday, October 17, 2008 11:02 AM by willeke | 0 Comments

Silverlight 2 RTW, or, how Microsoft choked
First, I'll repeat the news that's all over: Microsoft has released the "final" version of Silverlight 2.0 to the world! This is a major step for .NET developers, because it means we can do really incredible things on the web without massive injections Read More...

Posted Tuesday, October 14, 2008 12:45 PM by willeke | 1 Comments

Three things
Trust Value Integrity These three things are what I find to be the three critical aspects of all of the professional (and personal) relationships I share. Trust, for me, is continually completing the things I say I will do. Trust is easily built by committing Read More...

Posted Saturday, October 04, 2008 4:50 PM by willeke | 0 Comments

Today, I played designer
It was rather nice. For a few minutes earlier today, I was able to experience the designer's perspective of Blend. We had a bug filed on one of our common controls' visual appearance, and a designer and a developer were pairing on cleaning it up. They Read More...

Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2008 11:33 AM by willeke | 0 Comments

More thoughts on overtime
Every few months something triggers a series of thoughts in my head about overtime practices, behaviours, and incentives. Every time I think about it, my thoughts come back to a question of the relative incentives in the way our software development system. Read More...

Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 12:22 PM by willeke | 0 Comments

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Mr. Sowell goes to software.
There is no need to attempt to determine the net effect of cities on costs in general. First of all, there is no such thing as costs in general. There are particular costs that matter differently to particular individuals and enterprises, and those individuals Read More...

Posted Friday, August 22, 2008 11:56 AM by willeke | 0 Comments

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Back from Agile2008!
Wow, so much I probably should talk about, but I don't even know where to start. Massive amounts of networking, information, realization, and even contribution going on, and I can't unravel it at all right now. I think there's a lot of potential for transforming Read More...

Posted Tuesday, August 12, 2008 12:11 PM by willeke | 0 Comments

30 days later
Wow - it's been over thirty days since my last post. What's changed since then? First, we've put http://inkubook.com into production. I'm very proud of the work I've done and that my team has done on this one. We killed ourselves getting it done, but Read More...

Posted Friday, July 25, 2008 9:39 AM by willeke | 1 Comments

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And a subtle shift scrumward
Our team has decided to take a step back towards scrum and away from our previous semi-Kanban approach. I think that it's a good plan at this time, although I also suspect that many of the benefits of our earlier approach will continue to show through. Read More...

Posted Friday, June 20, 2008 1:37 PM by willeke | 0 Comments

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Career progression
In the beginning, there is no resume, only an application. Then, there is the resume. Later, the resume becomes an afterthought, used to round out the paperwork. Until, eventually, there is no resume, only trust. Read More...

Posted Sunday, June 15, 2008 11:12 AM by willeke | 0 Comments

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Software Development Meme
Thanks Dan , I don't have time for this, but you went and called me out. Here is the trace of how this request eventually got to me: Michael Eaton ( post ) -> Sarah Dutkiewicz ( post ) -> Jeff Blankenburg ( post ) -> Josh Holmes ( post ) –> Read More...

Posted Saturday, June 14, 2008 9:27 AM by willeke | 0 Comments

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 - Breaking changes
Lots of little things with various results. The breaking changes list got me through 99% of them, here's some of the others, and I'll probably update now and then with more. 1 - Image.Source property. Before, I could use this to find out if I've already Read More...

Posted Wednesday, June 11, 2008 12:18 PM by willeke | 0 Comments

Thoughts on Batch Size
The concepts surrounding batch size have been floating around my head again in recent days. My current assignment is a rather large batch of work with Silverlight 2.0, but it's one that I've been able to subdivide into a number of small batches that rapidly Read More...

Posted Tuesday, June 03, 2008 5:29 PM by willeke | 0 Comments

Inkubook is (briefly) hiring!
Effective _now_, we are hiring a single experienced individual into an architect or senior developer role. If you have a desire to work with an incredible team, have great .NET coding skills, and have a desire to see your work become a real product in Read More...

Posted Saturday, May 24, 2008 8:39 AM by willeke | 0 Comments

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Indy Geek Beer
http://IndyGeekBeer.org Just a bunch of nerds and geeks gathering at the moon dog to have a couple beers and chat about what's what in the world. Probably [can't be] too much tech, but we'll see ;) Read More...

Posted Friday, May 16, 2008 3:19 PM by willeke | 0 Comments

Twitter up!
I've finally been pulled in by the twitter-mass in the Indy dev community (I blame you, Larry). I'm at erwilleke Read More...

Posted Monday, April 28, 2008 11:33 AM by willeke | 0 Comments

Speaker's dinner!
I'm sitting at the after-party for today's CodeCamp. I wasn't going to come, but I was asked yesterday if I could speak, so I ran my Branch Management speech for four people (double last time!) that were still around the last session. The good thing is Read More...

Posted Saturday, April 26, 2008 6:22 PM by willeke | 1 Comments

And now, the issues past, Silverlife is wonderful!
I've managed to get past the random issues that seem to plague me when adopting new technologies, and I'm digging into the meat of Silverlight 2.0 (Beta 1). This is GREAT! Blend is a great tool, and they've made using resources SO MUCH BETTER! The visual Read More...

Posted Friday, April 18, 2008 9:25 AM by willeke | 0 Comments

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Nasty upgrade bug with .NET 3.5...
or silverlight, or visual studio, or something. Anyway, my work is in the Silverlight.net installation forum under a post titled "Silverlight startup error with resources - Summary of fix" The corrected file is attached here, and I hate wasting a full Read More...

Posted Tuesday, April 15, 2008 10:13 PM by willeke | 0 Comments

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Attachment(s): Microsoft.Common.targets

The first time
Thursday, after the main IndyNDA event, I performed my first public presentation. I've presented to teams, classrooms, and my company before, but this is the first time I've had the opportunity to present to an uncontrolled group of my professional peers. Read More...

Posted Saturday, April 12, 2008 2:15 PM by willeke | 0 Comments


Attachment(s): Rich Branch Management.ppt

My first live blog post... April Indianapolis .NET Developers Association
I've never done this before... I'm sitting in the IndyNDA event for this month, and since there's wireless, and I've got my computer, and IndyNDA's got tables, I thought I'd actually give live posting a try. Expect a stream of thought as I (partially) Read More...

Posted Thursday, April 10, 2008 5:11 PM by willeke | 0 Comments

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Linq entities and calling Attach()
Back to tech, for now. I like Linq to SQL. A LOT. However, there have been a handful of things that have annoyed me, and one of them is the story around serialization and disconnected entities. They've built a nice engine for it (DataContract-based), Read More...

Posted Friday, April 04, 2008 2:58 PM by willeke | 0 Comments

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What would you do with a 12 passenger van?
My wife and I, as instructors and directors at Dan Shi Martial Arts Club , would use it to make a huge difference in the lives of our students. We currently pick up 12 children in inner-city Indianapolis every Saturday, Monday, and Wednesday. For the Read More...

Posted Wednesday, March 12, 2008 3:38 PM by willeke | 0 Comments

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